Note to Gen-Y - You Do Not Have To Work For Free

There's a scene in Girls where Lena Dunham's character Hannah asks to be paid by the publishing house at which she's been interning. Her superior smiles, thanks her, and wishes her well. As Hannah shambles out the door, she takes one last desperate shot, asking why the other young woman sitting before a computer screen was hired as an employee for pay.

Because she knows how to use PhotoShop.

It's a funny-sad moment as is all Girls humor, but according to the L.A. Times, it's more fact that fiction.

Covering the same episode, the Times quotes Richard Nash, former head of the publishing house where Dunham interned as saying, Around 2006-2007, if an intern knew their way around Quark and Photoshop they were gold dust.

You Don't Have To Work For Free

Yesterday, I spoke to a class of law, MBA, and LL.M students at Pepperdine's Straus Institute of Conflict Resolution. Wanting to be genuinely useful rather than just another talking pedant, I asked each student as they entered whether they were prepared to negotiate their first salary. Even if they felt that their first-rate negotiation professor Maureen Weston had taught them well, several had already worked without pay and others were planning to.

You do not have to work for free, I told them.

No one with the need to hire a law or graduate student is unable to pay you, no matter how bad the economy. I believe it's illegal to engage your services without paying you but there is more than one opinion about that. If it's not illegal, it's surely unethical to be exploiting students and blaming it on the recession.

The students who had worked for free were not giving their time away because their "employers" couldn't afford to pay them. They were working for free because they were too demoralized to ask to be paid.

One student's time was being billed out at the rate of $140 an hour and another worked for a prominent attorney who was well known to be doing very well financially.

I was told by several other students - who were shocked to be informed they shouldn't be working for free - that they'd been advised by their law school's career services center to take anything they could get, including unpaid work.

And that's just wrong.

Here, then, are the top three reasons you - Gen-Y - should not be working for free.